I'm a transgender girl happily on a journey to looking better, being more feminized and overcoming adversity. Whether in your teens or way beyond, if you’re a transgender girl, this is for you. Like an embassy in a hostile land, this is the place to gain strength, to get empowering information and to belong. I made this place based on what I've learned; I hope it helps you. Welcome home.

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Bathrooms

As I progress towards looking ever more like the girl I basically am, I now and then get external reminders that I’m making progress.

I do lingerie modeling, so I am pretty darn blatant about external reminders. If I look good enough to make a decent amount of money, then I figure that I’m probably making fairly decent progress. Lingerie modeling isn’t for everyone and I don’t recommend it for the faint of heart, or those without well-developed self-defense and interpersonal skills. How someone looks in this business is just one aspect. There’s a lot to the business.

Apart from modeling: for me as a transgender girl, bathrooms are the new frontier. As the law has been explained to me, I should go into the bathroom whose gender sign matches what’s on my driver’s license, regardless of how this feels to me emotionally. In Nevada, I gather it’s illegal for a transgender girl to go into the ladies’ room until her driver’s license reads “Female” — even in private establishments. As a free-market person I think it’s for the owner of the business to decide and for the law to butt out, but until these ideas catch on, this problem will exist, and it’s good for me to be aware of what the law is. When in doubt, I found that it’s fine to ask.

For example, I really like the Peppermill Hotel and Casino in Reno, NV. Many months ago, I called them, asked for the head of security, and explained the situation. He in turn explained their policy as to which restroom I should use, and he added that if anyone hassles me about that, then I am welcome to request that security staff become involved. He was most professional and helpful, and I have since then spent much more time and money at that business, and I have recommended it publicly in person and in writing, as I am doing here too, yet again.

Still, which bathroom someone else thinks I should be using, based on how I look, tells me a lot about how convincingly female I nowadays look. And tonight, when I was at the Silver Peak Brewery Restaurant and Bar, I asked the nice waitress to point me to the restroom, and when I ended up in the corner of the room to which she’d pointed me, I found that I’d just been given a compliment, since the only restroom in that vicinity was the ladies’ room. I smiled, and I explained to the waitress that I’m a transgender girl and should for now still use the men’s room until I get my driver’s license updated. She was most gracious and pointed me towards the men’s room instead.

Two weekends ago, I was at the Hyatt by San Francisco Airport, and everyone was super-nice except for the bathroom cleaning attendant, who stared at my with the expression that was the visual equivalent of: “You’re a lady. What are *you* doing in the men’s room?” — another nice implied compliment.

The day before that, I was at the Hyatt by the San Francisco Embarcadero, in the men’s bathroom, and a guy came in, seemed unhappy and left, and then a bathroom maintenance man walked in, frowning. He stopped and stared at me for a long time. I gather the man had presumed there’s a lady in the men’s bathroom and had complained to the bathroom maintenance man, who happened to be nearby. It took some hard staring before he concluded I wasn’t simply a genetically integrated girl in the wrong bathroom.

Perhaps with more self-confidence, I wouldn’t need these external validations, but for me, personally, they’re nice.

The pictures below are of me, as I looked that night.

Note, dated April 8th, 2013:

I have since had my driver’s license corrected to gender=”F” so now I don’t have to deal with bathroom issues any more.